WWII vet reflects on ‘beautiful life’

Eighty years ago, Ray Fein was serving in World War II.

He enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 28, 1944, the same year that he graduated from high school.

He received an honorable discharge July 3, 1946.

Fein, 98, grew up in Irvington during the Great Depression.

In those days, people typically saved everything. He remembers a friend who kept piles of old shoes in his closet and eventually decided to throw out a pair. After his mother arrived home, he told her what he had done, and she responded, “But you could have saved the shoelaces.”

During the war, most of the people he knew opted to enlist, he said, recalling the motto: “All gave some; some gave all.”

Everybody did their part for their country, he said, hailing this as a unifying sentiment among young people at that time.

Fein was trained in Sampson, N.Y., before being transferred to San Diego, then Shoeman, Calif., before he was sent to the island of Samar in the Philippines. He worked in the personnel office there, managing war supplies.

Learning lessons

Young men in the Navy used to gather to sing songs, including one about the blue star that families would put in their windows when they had a son in the service. If their son was killed, it would be replaced with a gold star.

“Take that blue star out of the window; Replace it with one made of gold; Your son is an amphibious sailor; He’ll die when he’s 18 years old,” he sang.

An amphibious sailor was someone who served both on water and land.

Reflecting on these songs, he said the young men would recite the lyrics together as a group, everyone going “along with the crowd,” but perhaps not immediately processing the full meaning and weight of their words.

“They don’t know anything,” he said. “They think they know, but I don’t think they think about that.”

Fein said he learned something from everyone he met.

The office where he worked was right by the beach and not too far from a small village where many Filipinos lived. One weekend, the Navy men were near the village and were invited to have lunch with some of the residents, who were roasting a pig.

An older Navy man told him and the other boys that even if they did not like the food, they should eat it because these people had little for themselves and still were offering it to others.

“He said, ‘You can’t insult these people. These people don’t have anything. They have just about enough to eat, and you can’t criticize them or the food,’ ” Fein said. “That was a big lesson, and that was a good thing.”

Married 70 years

When he returned home, Fein married Marcia Rosenberg. They were married for 70 years until she died in 2017 at age 90.

The couple had three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Fein thought he might become an accountant and was accepted into Pace Institute in New York.

However, he knew he would not be able to work during the day and attend school at night so he decided to pursue a job hanging wallpaper instead.

One time, he was hanging wallpaper in a Long Island doctor’s office with a single-edge razor blade, and he accidentally cut his finger. He asked for a bandage, and the doctor asked him what kind of paper hanger cuts his own finger.

Admittedly a little annoyed, Fein said that even the best surgeons make mistakes.

“He says, ‘Yes, on you, not on themselves.’ How about that? How about that for a professional? You find the doctor that will talk to you like that. But I got the message. I did it to myself.”

Overall, Fein said he has had “such a beautiful life.”

‘Getting to be an orphan’

He survived both his son, David, who died at age 65, and one of his daughters, Betsy Fusek. In two years, he lost two children, his wife, his brother and a brother-in-law who was like a brother, he said.

“It was like I was getting to be an orphan.”

He still has several loving family members, including grandchildren who come to visit. One grandchild writes him letters and sends birthday cards.

In one of them, she was naming some of the occasions she missed celebrating with the family and said she even likes Fein’s “unsolicited advice,” which made him laugh.

These days, Fein speaks to students and no doubt gives his fair share of advice.

Young people these days have the whole world in front of them, he said, noting that so many choose drugs even when they are smart and have the potential to be anything they want to be.

Fein recalled when he was a boy living in Bloomfield, and his aunt lived next door with her husband and family. She was in the kitchen one day singing, “Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky. So let’s have another cup of coffee. Let’s have another piece of pie.”

He did not understand why she would be singing such a song during the Depression but the lyric’s core message resonated with him.

“Everything is just around the corner,” he said. “I come down from upstairs, and I’m walking down the hallway. I’m almost to the desk, and you have to turn to our right. Just around the corner, turn the corner. All of a sudden, I see somebody there that I know I haven’t seen in a while or somebody from before or somebody new. Somehow we get into a conversation.

“It’s just around the corner. Something is going to happen. And it does.”